The Couch & the Confessional

"Psychoanalysis is old stuff to the Catholics, of course. Only they do it on their knees for free, instead of on a couch at $10 an hour."

This easy assumption that the Roman

Catholic Sacrament of confession is an ancient form of psychiatry (or that psychiatry is a secular corruption of confession) is common among Catholics, and shared by some non-Catholics. But the assumption is founded on ignorance: few Catholics know enough about psychiatry and few secularists enough about confession to see the deep-set difference between them. An articulate exception is the Rev. Victor White, a British Dominican, who writes about the difference in the current issue of the Catholic weekly, Commonweal.

Both techniques, says Father White, are valid means of combating two forms of evil -- one called sin and one called psychoneurosis. "But the evil with which each is concerned is essentially different, even mutually opposed. Sin is denned as an evil human act . . . malum culpae --'the evil men do' ... A psychoneurosis, on the contrary, is a certain malum poenae -- an 'evil men suffer' or 'undergo' . . . Confession presupposes the power to sin and to turn from sin and seek forgiveness ; analysis usually presupposes necessity and impotence . . ."

Therefore, writes Father White, material that the psychiatrist considers valuable may be rejected by the priest as self-infatuated garbage. "What a penitent is expected to confess is very clearly denned and restricted to the sins committed since his baptism or his previous confession. No such limitation can bind the analyst . . . The patient's 'good deeds' will interest . . . [the analyst] no less than his 'bad' ones . . . while dreams, free associations, spontaneous reactions and other manifestations of the unconscious will interest him still more."

When it comes to changing men's lives, Father White suggests that psychiatry may find itself looking to religion. He quotes famed Swiss Psychiatrist C. G. Jung: "During the past 30 years, people from all the civilized countries of the earth have consulted me. I have treated many hundreds of patients, the larger number being Protestants, a small number Jews, and not more than five or six believing Catholics. Among all my patients in the second half of life . . . there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding, a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age had given to their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook."

Yet Father White wonders whether God may not sometimes use the couch as well as the confessional to save a soul: "While man is limited to the appointed channels of grace and forgiveness, God is not so limited; and there seems to be no foregone reason why the theologian can deny to dream-symbolism the . . . efficacy he must allow to the sacraments . . . or -- it may be added -- the dream symbols of the Scriptures. Though little can be affirmed or denied with certainty, the resemblances are sometimes too impressive to be totally ignored."

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